English, Flappers

Flappers were a "new breed" of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.Flappers had their origins in the liberal period of the Roaring twentys, the social, political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War 1, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.Flappers took their name from a tendency of young women in the late-1910s and early-1920s to leave their galoshes unfastened (“flapping” as they walked), and it should be stressed that Clara Bow was not the first to portray a flapper on screen. A film called The Flapper starring Olive Thomas appeared as early as 1920, and other well-known film flappers before Clara arrived on the scene included Colleen Moore, Bebe Daniels, and Mae Murray. But, especially after “It,” Clara was, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) put it, “the quintessence of … the term … pretty, impudent, superbly assured, as worldly-wise, briefly clad, and ‘hard-burled’ [hard-boiled] as possible.

Steinbeck's viewDuring Steinbeck's time, women were not held in high regard and they were viewed as only present to serve men. He grew up with the mentality that women were to work in the home to cook and clean.He reveals his outlook on women by depicting them as unintelligent and unimportant. 

Flappers